Weekend in New York Souvenir Gift Shopping New YorkCentric Gifts Subway Dog Collar or Skyline Butter Dish? NYTimes.com

IT’S hard to remember exactly when, but at some point in history a Statue of Liberty foam hat, an Empire State Building snow globe and a MoMA poster of Monet’s “Water Lilies” made for perfectly adequate gifts to bring back from the Big Apple. These days, though, gift recipients have grown sophisticated, and no traveler wants to be labeled “the guy who went to New York and all his friends got were these lousy six-for- ‘I Love N.Y.’ T-shirts.”

Instead, gifts must be creative, useful or at least purposefully ironic. They should clearly be from New York, but not say “New York,” nor involve big or even medium-sized apples. Your neighbor, the transplanted New Yorker who didn’t quite make the gift list, should be envious, not mocking.

Government-related gifts seem to have caught on: you can get manhole cover doormats, sanitation worker hats, and almost anything N.Y.P.D. But the Transit Authority may have the most advanced gift sensibilities; its licensed gear, ranging from F-train T-shirts to subway token cuff links, is everywhere nontacky gifts are sold.

The mother lode is in the Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights or the more convenient Transit Museum annex in Grand Central Terminal. It’s a one-stop-shop for MetroCard beach towels, wooden toy subway cars, a subway map umbrella, even subway-line-specific dog collars decorated with the circular symbols of the trains. The Eighth Avenue line collar is perfect for dogs named ACE, though the M.T.A.’s designers did miss a chance by not combining the G train and the R train to create a GRRR collar, perfect for poodles trying to appear more intimidating.

Uniquely New York food or drink, of course, is a great idea if well thought out: street-vendor hot dogs and 2nd Avenue Deli chopped liver don’t travel too well. But few will not love a dozen H & H bagels you can pick up hot on your way to the airport, 24 hours a day. Pack them in your checked luggage; if you carry them on, you may find your bagels have shifted in the overhead compartment during the flight — into your fellow passengers’ mouths. You also could do worse than picking out a bottle or two of New York State wine, the specialty of Vintage New York in SoHo.

Recovering souvenir-plate collectors may want to check out the New York-centric dishware from Fishs Eddy on Broadway in Chelsea. The 212 Skyline line is the classic, with a labeled Manhattan skyline around the circumference of the plates and bowls. There are also Central Park, Five Borough and square-plated Brooklyn lines available; items like salt and pepper shakers and butter dishes are more portable gifts.

Brooklyn is a good decade into its 15 minutes of fame, so the messenger bags from Brooklyn Industries, an upscale chain of clothing stores with a Brooklyn rooftop logo, is a good choice. Their T-shirts are also cool, if you can stand the price tag: there are Brooklyn Bridge images and Brooklyn spelled out in sign language. But the best, for those looking to be obscure, just reads BQE, as in Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the much-maligned, always-under-construction highway linking the two boroughs.

For less than half the price (and, for better or worse, less than half the hipness), you can pick up the T-shirts and bags from the Strand Bookstore near Union Square. Its “18 miles of books” slogan is very New York (though perhaps not as New York as the fact that a Spanish version is available, “18 millas de libros”). The T-shirts come in all sizes and what was once just an iconic tote bag is now available in all kinds of varieties. By the way, they also have sharply discounted New York City books, including gift-ready classics like the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham: a History of New York City to 1898,” and “The Encyclopedia of New York City.”

Should there be lovers of strawberry Charleston Chews or bubble gum cigarettes on your list, Economy Candy is a good place to shop. To add the New York element, add a Yankees giant Pez dispenser () or an Economy Candy T-shirt, featuring the logo of a kid with a tremendous cowlick presiding over a colorful smorgasbord of treats ().

Those who don’t believe in the division of church and T-shirt may consider a visit to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin’s gift shop near Times Square. They sell “Smokey Mary” T-shirts in their gift shop on Sundays, but no cheating: the store doesn’t open until Mass is over. The church’s heavy use of incense explains the nickname, but not the flaming censer logo (ask for the story). A small bottle of the incense itself, made especially for the church by a parishioner who now lives in Arizona, is , and they’ve recently begun stocking what may be the worst possible New York City gift in history, a bound 320-page photocopy of Kyle Babin’s 2008 doctoral thesis about music at St. Mary’s from 1868 to the present.

But perhaps the best spot around for great New York gift-shopping is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. They have a bit of everything, including some subway stuff, Fishs Eddy skyline butter dishes, unusual notecards, New York-based kids’ books, New York City restaurant cookbooks, and perhaps the only wrapping paper in the world worth its price. For just .95 you get wrapping paper printed with an old city map that could just as easily be a poster. Wrap something in that, and your gift doesn’t even have to be that great after all. (Idea: a liter of genuine New York City tap water, drawn from your hotel sink into a delabeled Poland Springs bottle.)

NO APPLES, BIG OR OTHERWISE

New York City Transit Museum Gallery Annex and Store, Grand Central Terminal, (212) 878-0106; www.transitmuseumstore.com.

H & H Bagels, 639 West 46th Street, (212) 595-8000, or 2239 Broadway at 80th Street, (212) 595-8003; www.hhbagels.com.

Vintage New York, 482 Broome Street, (212) 226-9463, or 2492 Broadway at 93rd Street, (212) 721-9999; www.vintagenewyork.com.

Fishs Eddy, 889 Broadway and 19th Street, (212) 420-9020; www.fishseddy.com.

Brooklyn Industries, 161 Eighth Avenue at 18th Street, (212) 206-0477, www.brooklynindustries.com.

Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway at 12th Street, (212) 473-1452; www.strandbooks.com.

Economy Candy, 108 Rivington Street, (800) 352-4544; www.economycandy.com.

Church of St. Mary the Virgin, 145 West 46th Street, (212) 869-5830; www.stmvirgin.org

Lower East Side Tenement Museum Shop, 108 Orchard Street, (212) 431-0233; www.tenement.org.